If you run a company in specialty materials or the new energy economy, you already know the hardest part of growth is rarely the technology. It is finding the one person who can take what you have built and scale it.
I have spent more than 30 years finding those people. Coatings, polymers, paints, adhesives, specialty chemicals, and now the fast-moving world of batteries, fuel cells, electrolyzers, and grid storage. The leaders I work with are not trying to fill a seat. They are trying to find someone who can take the business somewhere it has never been, and do it without a year of ramp-up time they do not have.
This is the question I am asked more than any other. How do you actually hire an executive who can do that, in an industry this technical? Here is the honest answer, built from three decades of getting it right, and occasionally watching others get it wrong.
The short version: You hire for credibility in your specific market, for the instinct to build rather than maintain, and for the judgment to scale fast without breaking what already works. That person almost never comes from a job board. They come from a network built over decades, and they move because they trust the person making the call.
Now let me explain what that means, and why it matters far more in our world than in most.
Why Executive Hiring in Specialty Materials Is Different
Your business does not fit in a neat box. Your materials might end up in automotive coatings, architectural finishes, electronics, or a battery enclosure. The person who leads your commercial team or your operation has to understand that complexity. Not in theory. In the specifics of process, application, and where your products actually create value.
This is where most searches go wrong before they even start. A candidate can have an impressive title and a strong resume, and still be useless to you, because they cannot speak credibly to your market. In our industries, credibility is not optional. Your customers are technical. Your competitors are specialized. A leader who cannot hold a real conversation about performance characteristics will not be taken seriously, inside the company or outside it.
So the first thing I look for is credibility to the market. You cannot pull someone from far outside the industry and expect them to land. What you can do, and what I spend my days doing, is find the person one layer out. The one whose technical relevance and skills transfer, who can be credible on day one, and who brings something your team does not already have. Finding that next layer of relevance is a craft, and it is the whole job.
The New Energy Economy Is Rewriting the Talent Map
Something is happening right now that makes this work more urgent than it has been in years.
The new energy economy is pulling specialty materials expertise into entirely new applications. Electrochemical systems. Flow batteries. Hydrogen, electrolyzers, fuel cells. Grid-scale storage and electrical transmission. The chemistry that has always mattered in coatings and polymers now sits at the center of how the world stores and moves energy.
I will give you a real example. One of my clients makes a coating that lets electricity conduct through the surface without eating away at the parts underneath. For grid-scale batteries, that is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a system that lasts and one that corrodes itself apart. Another client is working on battery wear as the industry pushes toward higher and higher capacity. These are not abstract problems. They demand leaders who understand both the materials science and the commercial opportunity sitting on top of it. That is exactly the kind of energy storage executive recruiting that a generalist simply cannot do.
Here is what I am seeing across the board. The talent exists, but a lot of it is sitting in legacy organizations that grew comfortably at five or ten percent a year. The companies that will win in this space are the ones doubling or tripling. The gap is not a shortage of smart people. The gap is leadership that knows how to scale, that will make bolder capital decisions, and that can pick which markets to chase with good enough information to move fast. Demand is outstripping supply, and every growth leader in this space already knows it. Manufacturing leadership is growing in the United States again, and the firms that move first will own the next decade.
Your Company Stage Changes Everything
Before we even talk about candidates, I want to know one thing. What stage is your company in, and who owns it?
This matters more than most leaders expect, and it is why executive hiring and company stage have to be considered together. The right hire is a different person depending on who owns the company:
- A family-owned business needs a leader who respects the founder’s DNA and builds on it.
- A private equity backed company needs someone who can move at speed and hold their nerve when projections shift.
- A company scaling on its first serious investment needs a builder who has created systems, not just run them.
The skills overlap. The temperament does not.
A family business carries the founder’s DNA in everything it does. The leader you bring in has to respect that, add real capability, and resist the urge to remake the culture in their first 90 days. I have placed a lot of executives into family companies that are ready to scale fast, and the ones who succeed share a specific quality. They build on what is there. They do not bulldoze it.
Private equity is a different game. The pace is faster, the expectations are higher, and the projections can shift mid-search in ways that change everything, including an offer. I still work with private equity backed companies in specialty materials, and I work with them differently, because the search itself has to be managed for that volatility. Getting this wrong is costly in a market this small, where reputations travel fast.
Hire Builders, Not Maintainers
If there is one idea I would put on every hiring decision in our industries, it is this. The market is full of maintainers. You need a builder.
A maintainer keeps the machine running. They optimize what already exists. They can squeeze the last drop of efficiency out of a process or a sales pipeline, and in the right seat, that is genuinely valuable. But a maintainer will not take you from one stage to the next. They have never built the road. They have only driven on it.
A builder-leader is the executive who has created something before. They have the entrepreneurial instinct to move into an adjacent market, the technical fluency to know what is actually possible, and the strategic mind to lay out every step of how to get there. In our industries, this profile is rare and worth holding out for. They can sit in front of your board and talk strategy, then walk the plant floor and talk process. They think at a high level, and they are not afraid to get their hands dirty.
These are the people I spend my career finding. They rarely look obvious on paper, which is precisely why a generalist screens them out instead of in.
The Best People Are Not Looking for a Job
Here is the part that trips up almost every internal hiring effort.
The executives who could genuinely transform your company are not on a job board. They are succeeding right where they are. They are not refreshing listings or firing off applications. They are passive candidates, and reaching them is an entirely different discipline than collecting resumes. Passive candidate executive search is not about volume. It is about trust.
I will be direct about how this works for us. The last several executive searches I completed came from my own network. People I have known for decades. They trusted Thomas Brooke as a known quantity in these industries, and they were willing to consider a move because of relationships built over 30 years, not because of a clever message in their inbox. That is not something you can manufacture in a six-week search. It is the product of a career.
This is also why how you find an executive recruiter for specialty industries matters so much. The right partner is not the one with the biggest database. It is the one with the deepest relationships in your specific world, and the standing to make a call that actually gets returned.
Plan for the Seat After This One
The best hires are not only about the role in front of you. They are about the role after it.
Some of the most rewarding work I do is succession planning, where the brief is not simply to fill a VP seat but to find the person who can grow into the president’s chair within a year. That changes everything about the search. The candidate has to be credible today and ready tomorrow. They have to earn the trust of a board before they ever hold the title. That is a far more demanding profile than a standard hire, and it is one of the places where a deliberate, deep search pays off most.
If you are thinking even one move ahead, the executive you bring in now should be someone who can carry more weight later. In a fast-scaling company, that is not a luxury. It is how you avoid running the same painful search twice.
What a Wrong Hire Actually Costs
Let me be honest about the stakes, because most companies underestimate them.
An executive hiring mistake in specialty materials is not just a salary you wasted. A wrong hire at the VP or director level can:
- Stall a product launch you have been building toward for months.
- Damage a key customer relationship that took years to earn.
- Send the wrong signal to your board at exactly the wrong time.
- Cause your best people to lose confidence and leave.
In our industries, where technical knowledge and customer relationships take years to build, the damage compounds. You do not just lose the time. You lose the momentum.
This is the real argument for getting the search right the first time. Not because the fee is the issue. Because the cost of the alternative is so much higher than it looks on a spreadsheet.
The same logic applies to executive compensation. A smart, well-informed approach to what you offer is not about spending more. It is about understanding what the right person actually values, and building an offer that lands. I have watched strong searches fall apart at the final step over a package built on guesswork. That is an avoidable loss, and a costly one.
How We Work at Thomas Brooke
We operate on a retained search basis, and we do it for a reason. When we commit to your search, we work for you alone. Not running the same candidate to three of your competitors. Not racing to a placement so we can move on to the next fee.
What that buys you is focus. We take the time to understand your business, your stage, your market, and the specific person who can move it forward. We reach into a network built over three decades. We stand behind our placements with a one-year guarantee, because we have no interest in a hire that does not last. Most of our clients come back to us again and again, which is the only endorsement in this business that means anything.
We are a US-based team, and we work across specialty materials, coatings, polymers, paints, and the full new energy economy. We know these industries because we have lived in them.
Let’s Find the Person Your Company Needs Next
If you are facing a hire that has to be right, not just good, that is exactly the kind of search we exist for. The leaders who change a company are out there. Finding them takes someone who knows where to look, who they will trust enough to pick up the phone, and what separates a builder from a maintainer in a room full of impressive resumes.
That is the work. After 30 years, it is still the work I love most.
